It’s been 6 years since my world was severly shaken. I remember it so vividly. April 2015 was the moment when it all began. I decided to move out from a nice dorm with a lovely chinese friend of mine to try to get better at german. I moved in with two germans and I was excited to start learning more about the culture and the language. That didn’t happened, and I didn’t know it back then. That was the time when I started feeling a bit odd with everything around me and inside of me. I experienced so many changes in the same month, new semester, new teaching methologies, new roommates, academic stress. I remember when trying to land on a thesis topic I would stay at the library each single night until early mornings so that I would tire myself enough to just arrive “home” and fall asleep inmediately, so that I didn’t have to face my reality there.
I started feeling bad about myself, for not being able to accomplish anything (in my mind). The nights got scarier and scarier, my thoughts started to confuse me, they were spinning round and round non-stop, not even at night and they got me in this vicious cycle asking me the same questions over and over again: “how are you going to do this?”, “I won’t be able to do it”, “I don’t know how to do this”, “are you smart or are you actually stupid?”, “are you even pretty?”, “are you really what you thought you were?”. With these thoughts and questions, my sleepless nights started to get accompanied with panic attacks …, my heart started pounting hard, every night, so hard that I felt my chest was going to explode and I was going to die. My hands would sweat, I wasn’t eating, I started to barely care about my physical appearance, and I was literally just “hanging there”, doing the least possible to keep my sh*t afloat and not dying while trying. I would constanly call my mother from the other side of the world, just so that I would feel safe and have some comfort.
That is how I began my path, my struggle and sacrifices with mental health. I didn’t know what was coming and I didn’t know that, that summer june and july 2015 would be the toughest, scariest, most horrific traumatic experience of my whole life so far. I still think about it almost every day, 6 years after… the trauma is so deeply-rooted that it feels as if I went to war with my own mind, and I got deadly-shot or injured. The scene, the memories, the experience is so fresh, as if it was just yesterday (and that is not overrated). That was the time where I completely gave in and surrendered, my mind, my body and my spirit. In a german psychiatric hospital bed in early morning, I remember it was dawning and I said it in my mind: “please take me now so that I can fall asleep”. With that not-so-serious phrase, that early morning, I committed what I consider today a “spiritual suicide”. My body, mind and spirit were not able to keep the suffering, after 7–10 days of non-sleep and being heavily psychotic, my whole system colapsed. I still don’t know how I survived this or how I physically didn’t die. When I woke up, I wasn’t already the same young-woman that existed before that. She died there, in that hospital bed, and at the same time, she didn’t know it, but, she was born anew.
2015 was tough. I was not the same woman after that and I continued to be clinically depressed until spring 2017, when I got my first experience with hypomania. Hypomania lifted me up and landed me in a complete different zone. I don’t remember ever feeling as happy, as high, as positive, as social and as friendly. I was so productive academically and my self-esteem sky rocketed, I slept between 3 to 5 hours every night and I was so excited to wake up to go on with my day.
Story in progress…
